Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

[aquaaa]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

communism is definitely not the way to help ease the worldwide poverty, in fact it causes a harmful domination over the poor ( ie. government vs. individuals ).

it also bothers me when poverty is led from the human nature of being lazy and then people sulk about how poor they are. BLAH but then that's just strictly looking at the individual not as a whole.

[clarinet89]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Personally, I think that we should try to fix our problems here before we go fixing other countries' problems, especially with the way that our economy is going. I do agree that we should try to help other countries when we can, but now just doesn't seem to be the right time to do it.

Also, I'm not sure how giving out money would be beneficial to those who truely need it. How can we be sure that the money is going to the impoverished people, instead of the few wealthy people?

[Vendetta21]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

There is a vast difference between the rich in society and the poor in society. This same concept can also be applied to the world's countries. North America and Europe (primarily Western) are far richer than any other countries/continents. My proposition is to have a greater balance of wealth. For instance, let's say that the rich countries have a GNP of 9, while the poor countries only have a GNP of 2. These richer countries could donate far more money to these poorer countries. So let's say that after donations the rich countries have a GNP of 6, while the poor countries have a GNP of 5. Although this would somewhat compromise the standard of living in Western society, it would exponentially increase the standard of living in the Third World (assuming that the money is kept away from corrupt governments). I, personally, believe that this is a feasible prospect. However, the biggest impediment to this course of action is the generosity of Western society. We have become so used to living a life of luxury and excess that we might reluctantly give it up for a lifestyle that should still be more than adequate.

This wouldn't work. It would take away the incentive for rich countries to make 9 GNP, and make the poor countries work less to make their 2 GNP, thus creating an overall less net GNP for everyone everywhere. If you feel guilty for being born into an affluent lifestyle than you should do something about it, but you shouldn't force it onto everyone.

Also, you should be happy to know that as the world globalizes trade that the unemployment rate world-wide goes down, economies become symbiotic to the interests of each other and the number of conflicts goes down, and things become cheaper. So humans are, in a way, solving their own problems by doing whats best for themselves, and quite rapidly at that.

The only major things a country needs to move forward are a stable government, a stable currency, and infrastructure. The rich countries really do try to help out the poorer countries with sustainable infrastructure projects, and regional unions try to help support stable government, but it's a slow game of progress in a lot of cases.

You don't want to give everyone in the world a fish for a day, you want to teach them to fish. Such that you don't want to just give them money to alleviate their problems, you want to give them a job, but we need to bring them to the point that they can get a job first, and that requires improvements in their government.

[Cavernio]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

What clarinet said, and more. I know the topic of this conversation is specifcally about getting rid of 'world' poverty instead of individual poverty, or something weird like that, but real poverty really has little to do with throwing money at governments of countries, and 'fighting' it should be done at a much smaller level.
Furthermore, GNP and even poverty is not a measurement of happiness or fulfillment, which is IMO vastly more important than wealth.
If you want to get rid of poverty, you need to make it so that rich people can't control the market, which only happens when there's no-one rich, which happens when there's no one poor. But since people try to become rich, there will be poor, unless the distribution of wealth is controlled by, say, governments. Your suggestion basically says that this will happen, except you're trying to do it at a more 'macro' level than what would need to be done. If we make all countries equally rich, there will still be people inside those countries who are poor. Now, maybe you want that, but if you do, I have no idea why, and that certainly isn't the impression I get.

aquua: You can work your ass off at minimum wage, or work your ass off raising kids, or work 14 hours a day in a sweatshop and still be poor. That person is not lazy. In particular, some people don't really have much of a choice, especially in poorer countries, to find better work. Their poverty have little if nothing to do with the individual. As for people who are 'lazy', most don't work hard at things because there are problems that stop them, whether they are physical, emotional or mental. Some of these problems are fixable, and some aren't.

dore: What kilroy said. Money doesn't come close to measuring all value.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

If you want to get rid of poverty, you need to make it so that rich people can't control the market, which only happens when there's no-one rich, which happens when there's no one poor. But since people try to become rich, there will be poor, unless the distribution of wealth is controlled by, say, governments. Your suggestion basically says that this will happen, except you're trying to do it at a more 'macro' level than what would need to be done. If we make all countries equally rich, there will still be people inside those countries who are poor. Now, maybe you want that, but if you do, I have no idea why, and that certainly isn't the impression I get.

Okay, I hate to bring in a pet subject here, but unfortunately this is based on a pet subject of mine, and something that is a central focus in my daily life, so here it goes.

1.) Rich people controlling the market does not create poverty. This is historically, and probably even empirically, wrong. Poverty can be created by inadequate management, an unstable social group or individual incapable of supporting a successful social structure, lack of ability to create something worth value to others, and prohibitive barriers to entry into a market. All of these things are theoretically solvable. Group solutions targeted at areas dense in poverty are more productive than solutions targeted at specific individuals who are in poverty.

2.) Having the government redistribute wealth does not solve poverty, it satiates it. In wealth distribution schemes it has been traditionally shown that the greater wealth redistribution is, the higher the poverty line goes, while also taking away incentives to move up the economic food chain. If someone is rich it is because what they do brings an immense amount of value to others, otherwise they wouldn't be rich. It is true that some people get rich by cheating others, but this is the special case, not the standard.

3.) Charity does not solve poverty unless it is targeted succinctly at causes rather than symptoms. A symptom of poverty is hunger. By giving people food you target a symptom rather than a cause. Causes of poverty are lack of jobs, lack of growth, and low upward mobility. Solving these issues requires improved infrastructure, improved education, and a socioeconomic structure which aims to operate best when the group it is designed for acts in their best interests. But we cannot solve issues of poverty where we implement solutions like these and the people under these solutions do not utilize them. The biggest problem in eliminating poverty in the world is usually infrastructure, and a close second is education. In cases where there is little infrastructure and little education it is impossible to move forward without them. These are not resource-limited areas, but they are severely impeded by a culture which rejects them in one way or another.

4.) Communism doesn't work, and socialism isn't about solving poverty. Socialism is about boosting up the middle class. If it was about solving poverty then it would reduce international trade barriers, because this is the biggest roadblock in eliminating poverty. But it doesn't. Do not confuse the so-called "goals" of socialism with the actual results of socialism. Socialism favors trade barriers as an effective solution to boost up the current middle class in the short-term while sapping the long-term prospects for an industry. Part of the problems of these barriers are that they make goods more expensive, and they lower the net purchasing power parity for the overall country. To help combat this issue, socialism redistributes wealth in order to help keep the amount of purchasing power the average middle and lower class family has the same. Socialism also favors lots of government programs that take away the need for private sector solutions. The idea is that if something is free for everyone through the government we all benefit, but in Europe it is more often than not true that a particular program is targeted towards a small group of individuals rather than targeted at everyone, and the solution they have for everyone that non-socialist countries don't have (health-care) are usually not as good as those non-socialist countries. The goal here is what is called by socialists the idea of "people over profits," but what it does is lowers efficiency and keeps productivity more stagnant, thus lowering growth. Growth is the solution to poverty, make no doubt about it, but this isn't about solving poverty.

[The_Q]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

This silly idea that the laws of nature shouldn't apply to us anymore is the cause of most of the problems facing the world. Frankly we could stand to lose a billion or so people.

Dear Devonin,

I'm sorry that science has been doing what it can to improve our quality of life. Next time we'll just let people develop parasites, diseases and have to hunt or gather their food so the laws of nature will apply more.

Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Insincerely,

Q

[Cavernio]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Okay, I hate to bring in a pet subject here, but unfortunately this is based on a pet subject of mine, and something that is a central focus in my daily life, so here it goes.

1.) Rich people controlling the market does not create poverty. This is historically, and probably even empirically, wrong. Poverty can be created by inadequate management, an unstable social group or individual incapable of supporting a successful social structure, lack of ability to create something worth value to others, and prohibitive barriers to entry into a market. All of these things are theoretically solvable. Group solutions targeted at areas dense in poverty are more productive than solutions targeted at specific individuals who are in poverty.

Inadequate management of what or who? Do people incapable of supporting social structure = people who dislike the current social structure? Almost everyone provides value to others, even bums on the street, so I can only conclude that this 'reason for poverty' is not true. Not like it matters because I don't really agree with your points because you haven't backed them up at all, but something being 'theoretically solvable' is quite different from actually being solvable. Theoretically, we can never have poverty.
As far group solutions go, I didn't say anything about them specifically. I attacked the idea that a country should be considered a 'group'. However, you've not backed up how solutions which target dense areas of poverty are more 'productive', whatever that means. From what I remember from my textbooks, intense work with each individual who are in a targeted group is what makes anti-poverty type interventions work in solving household poverty, drug-use, abuse, etc. I'm not even sure you'd have much 'individual' data beyond that, because hardly anyone does studies on 1 individual, so I really don't know how you can make the comparison you do. Perhaps all you're saying is if you fund an anti-poverty movement, giving it to people who all live close together, that money seems to go further than if you did that with the same number of people all over the country. No ****!

2.) Having the government redistribute wealth does not solve poverty, it satiates it. In wealth distribution schemes it has been traditionally shown that the greater wealth redistribution is, the higher the poverty line goes, while also taking away incentives to move up the economic food chain. If someone is rich it is because what they do brings an immense amount of value to others, otherwise they wouldn't be rich. It is true that some people get rich by cheating others, but this is the special case, not the standard..

I hate that I have to clarify what I say always. I never said that having the government redstribute wealth would get rid of poverty...I said that the OP said that. Secondly, half of this is reiterating what people have already said, and which I agree with! Thirdly, I don't believe money and value necessarily add up very well, despite what we try to do, and this also goes towards the fact that some rich people, who aren't cheating others, are not creating that much value. And as to people getting rich by 'cheating' others being uncommon, well, that's a matter of opinion in regards to what counts as cheating.

3.) Charity does not solve poverty unless it is targeted succinctly at causes rather than symptoms. A symptom of poverty is hunger. By giving people food you target a symptom rather than a cause. Causes of poverty are lack of jobs, lack of growth, and low upward mobility. Solving these issues requires improved infrastructure, improved education, and a socioeconomic structure which aims to operate best when the group it is designed for acts in their best interests. But we cannot solve issues of poverty where we implement solutions like these and the people under these solutions do not utilize them. The biggest problem in eliminating poverty in the world is usually infrastructure, and a close second is education. In cases where there is little infrastructure and little education it is impossible to move forward without them. These are not resource-limited areas, but they are severely impeded by a culture which rejects them in one way or another..

As to the first part of this paragraph, please don't make it look like it's targeted towards me. As I said earlier, I was talking about the OP. I totally agree with you that you have to fix causes and not symptoms.
"Low upward mobility"...what does this mean? How does a socioeconomic structure contain 'aims'? What a socioeconomic structure is, is a result of what you make, not the other way round. As far as not having infrastructure or education impeding wealth, have you ever thought about who determines that you need to be educated and that you need to have 'infrastructure' to have work? Can you not see that these themselves are something that the wealthy of society have forced as prerequisits for wealth? You say that rich people don't impede non-rich people at all, but yet you list 2 very good impediments that wouldn't exist in order to be wealthy, if the people who were rich didn't make them a requisite for being wealthy.
As far as poverty on a larger scale goes, if a culture rejects this way of life, who are we, as a rich nation, to enforce it? Unfortunately, we do enforce it, because if a group does not have education and infrastructure to support them, they will be exploited.

4.) Communism doesn't work, and socialism isn't about solving poverty. Socialism is about boosting up the middle class. If it was about solving poverty then it would reduce international trade barriers, because this is the biggest roadblock in eliminating poverty. But it doesn't. Do not confuse the so-called "goals" of socialism with the actual results of socialism. Socialism favors trade barriers as an effective solution to boost up the current middle class in the short-term while sapping the long-term prospects for an industry. Part of the problems of these barriers are that they make goods more expensive, and they lower the net purchasing power parity for the overall country. To help combat this issue, socialism redistributes wealth in order to help keep the amount of purchasing power the average middle and lower class family has the same. Socialism also favors lots of government programs that take away the need for private sector solutions. The idea is that if something is free for everyone through the government we all benefit, but in Europe it is more often than not true that a particular program is targeted towards a small group of individuals rather than targeted at everyone, and the solution they have for everyone that non-socialist countries don't have (health-care) are usually not as good as those non-socialist countries. The goal here is what is called by socialists the idea of "people over profits," but what it does is lowers efficiency and keeps productivity more stagnant, thus lowering growth. Growth is the solution to poverty, make no doubt about it, but this isn't about solving poverty.

Did I talk about socialism or communism? Did I put such a label on anything I said? No.
I understand that taking away profits and money from the people who would use them to make more profit slows economic growth. And I suppose I can see that growth is needed on the part of the people in poverty, in order for them to not be poor. However, overall growth is not needed to reduce poverty. In fact, there can totally be economic growth and an increase in poverty at the same time. Likewise, there can exist economic decline and with a decrease in poverty. With all your bitching about socialism preventing growth, it in fact did not address anything about poverty, except that you say it help put low (poverty stricken, in other words?) and middle-class income people in the same playing field. I don't quite understand how you can blame socialism for each country's individual decision about trade laws. (I also surely hope you've never pointed out that communism doesn't work for the reason of 'just look at Cuba!', because they've been under a trade embargo for years.)

[Vendetta21]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Inadequate management of what or who? Do people incapable of supporting social structure = people who dislike the current social structure? Almost everyone provides value to others, even bums on the street, so I can only conclude that this 'reason for poverty' is not true. Not like it matters because I don't really agree with your points because you haven't backed them up at all, but something being 'theoretically solvable' is quite different from actually being solvable. Theoretically, we can never have poverty.

Inadequate management of people to make use of their resources. If areas of poverty or individuals in poverty produced a good or service capable of bringing them money their poverty would be less profound or nonexistant. Poverty exists because of a lot of reasons, but the chief among them being people living in an socioeconomic structure which requires them to be a part of that structure to survive, and for various reasons people either don't or cannot integrate themselves successfully into that structure. It has nothing to do with liking or not liking, but simple the fact that people in poverty cannot trade a good or service others needs in exchange for the goods and services they need.

As a side note my points are not personal, and taking them personally begets a misunderstanding and an adversarial debate style. You are not my adversary in this debate, poverty is. And it doesn't matter if either of us are the smartest and most superior debaters who ever lived if what we propose isn't a viable solution to poverty. Please don't take anything I say personally, because you are not the scope of my points.

As far group solutions go, I didn't say anything about them specifically. I attacked the idea that a country should be considered a 'group'. However, you've not backed up how solutions which target dense areas of poverty are more 'productive', whatever that means. From what I remember from my textbooks, intense work with each individual who are in a targeted group is what makes anti-poverty type interventions work in solving household poverty, drug-use, abuse, etc. I'm not even sure you'd have much 'individual' data beyond that, because hardly anyone does studies on 1 individual, so I really don't know how you can make the comparison you do. Perhaps all you're saying is if you fund an anti-poverty movement, giving it to people who all live close together, that money seems to go further than if you did that with the same number of people all over the country. No ****!

In any economic situation you get marginal returns for each extra dollar spent. Targeting areas dense in poverty nets a better return for the amount invested, whereas targetting areas with less density of poverty has a lower return on investment. If the goal is eliminating poverty in the World, it is going to cost quite a lot more per capita to decrease the poverty rate by 5% in America than it is going to cost to do so in say, Sierra Lione. Likewise this holds weight if you're targeting poverty in America, that you will have a higher return per capita on your investment if you are targeting poverty in the Appalachian region than if you are targeting poverty in Seattle.

I hate that I have to clarify what I say always. I never said that having the government redstribute wealth would get rid of poverty...I said that the OP said that. Secondly, half of this is reiterating what people have already said, and which I agree with! Thirdly, I don't believe money and value necessarily add up very well, despite what we try to do, and this also goes towards the fact that some rich people, who aren't cheating others, are not creating that much value. And as to people getting rich by 'cheating' others being uncommon, well, that's a matter of opinion in regards to what counts as cheating.

I never said that you did. I was simply making a point, and I felt that it was still in context. And unfortunately we don't have a good objective metric for non-money values, and therefore we use the metric that has a high correlation with non-money value increase in life, which unfortunately is money. People are generally happier when they have enough money for subsistence plus a little extra. You can phrase this however you want and increasing income for the lower quintiles is still the most effective objective solution we can implement on a broad scale; the goal is to reduce poverty, the goal is to increase happiness in a utilitarian sense, the goal is to reduce income inequality, the goal is to improve humanity.

If your point is that macro solutions can't solve all the problems, then I will say the exact thing that will cease all further debate on this point: you're right.

Macro solutions are utilitarian in that they are trying to solve problems in a pragmatic broad way, but these macro solutions are just trying to make the most effective use of a large investment. And it's utilitarian, and no it doesn't solve everything. But that's not the point of a macro solution: the point of a macro solution is to implement a baseline solution which has the most effective return on investment, but not be the end-all be-all solution. These macro solutions are broad infrastructure spending and education spending.

As to the first part of this paragraph, please don't make it look like it's targeted towards me. As I said earlier, I was talking about the OP. I totally agree with you that you have to fix causes and not symptoms.

It wasn't intended to target you. I apologize. The point of my whole post is trying to limit the scope of this discussion to that which is capable of being understood without expert knowledge, and keep it focused on those aspects of poverty which are solvable on a broad scale.

"Low upward mobility"...what does this mean? How does a socioeconomic structure contain 'aims'? What a socioeconomic structure is, is a result of what you make, not the other way round. As far as not having infrastructure or education impeding wealth, have you ever thought about who determines that you need to be educated and that you need to have 'infrastructure' to have work? Can you not see that these themselves are something that the wealthy of society have forced as prerequisits for wealth? You say that rich people don't impede non-rich people at all, but yet you list 2 very good impediments that wouldn't exist in order to be wealthy, if the people who were rich didn't make them a requisite for being wealthy.

Low upward mobility means if you get a job at a firm, you have no chances for improving your income or getting a better job because the job doesn't have any prospects for "moving up." Also called commonly "dead end jobs." That the best job you could possibly hope to get in your sphere is one that has static income and no prospects for promotion.

A socioeconomic structure has a purpose or reason for existence, and that is its aim.

Who decides that you need education and infrastructure to work? Well no one and everyone. You need infrastructure in order for businesses to feel comfortable investing in an area. Without infrastructure businesses will have a huge amount of trouble obtaining any reasonable amount of success. Education? Well businesses traditionally want educated people, as well as the fact that educated people have a larger range of options in society.

It's not about telling people how to live their life, it's about giving them the ability to choose between a variety of lifestyles. If a person has no choice in their life about what they do and are forced into every decision while still remaining underfed and in fear all the time, our empathy and altruism urge us to believe that this is a poor lifestyle. It is not judging these people, but rather feeling sympathetic to their external conditions, and putting ourselves in their place. There is no reason that this is necessary the morally right way of looking at it, it's just that a large majority of people have empathetic sentiments like these.

As far as poverty on a larger scale goes, if a culture rejects this way of life, who are we, as a rich nation, to enforce it? Unfortunately, we do enforce it, because if a group does not have education and infrastructure to support them, they will be exploited.

It is not that we are enforcing it, it is that we are doing our best to improve the range and quality of choices that people have. The US certainly does exploit other countries and their citizens, but it's also true that we increase the range of choice a lot countries and their citizens have. Whether or not we're more good or more bad is subjective and up to you.

Did I talk about socialism or communism? Did I put such a label on anything I said? No. I understand that taking away profits and money from the people who would use them to make more profit slows economic growth. And I suppose I can see that growth is needed on the part of the people in poverty, in order for them to not be poor. However, overall growth is not needed to reduce poverty. In fact, there can totally be economic growth and an increase in poverty at the same time. Likewise, there can exist economic decline and with a decrease in poverty. With all your bitching about socialism preventing growth, it in fact did not address anything about poverty, except that you say it help put low (poverty stricken, in other words?) and middle-class income people in the same playing field. I don't quite understand how you can blame socialism for each country's individual decision about trade laws. (I also surely hope you've never pointed out that communism doesn't work for the reason of 'just look at Cuba!', because they've been under a trade embargo for years.)

Well I didn't say anything about you talking about communism, I was just clarifying points about communism and socialism. True communism doesn't work because it is dependent on an omnipotent central planner to be effective, and this is a really complicated economic idea so you'd honestly have to research it to understand, but essentially communism is not very good at allocating resources. Contrary to what one might believe, greed is not the number one reason communism is ineffective.

As for socialism, I was merely trying to illuminate that socialism has a humanist agenda but in effect has targets of limited scope. Just because someone has good intentions and aims to achieve a specific goal doesn't mean they will accomplish that goal in return for a diligent effort. The truth of the matter is that if your plan isn't good enough it won't work, even if it has the noblest of intentions. This is my personal belief about socialism, and I'm pretty sure that no one on this forum has the capacity to change my mind here, so the point is henceforth moot.

[Cavernio]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

I only thought you were targeted against me because you quoted me at the top of your post.

"Poverty exists because of a lot of reasons, but the chief among them being people living in an socioeconomic structure which requires them to be a part of that structure to survive, and for various reasons people either don't or cannot integrate themselves successfully into that structure."

This point is what I want to talk about in regards to saying that having rich people causes poor people. It touches on a point I almost put in in my first post which I decided to remove, but I want to touch on it again. We are both agreed the quoted sentence above. So surely you must see that if that infrastructure weren't there, there'd be no problems of trying to fit into it.
By definition poverty cannot exist without richness existing, because poverty is a comparison in resources. For instance, if you go to a secluded tribe in a jungle, they don't think they're impovershed until they have a comparison of what they don't have. Now, this does not mean that merely having wealth itself causes poverty, but its pretty damned close. Poverty would be much less of a concern if people could simply stay in poverty if they chose, and keep a lifestyle they're used to that they like, or climb the ladder of wealth if they wanted. Unfortunately, people can't do that, because people who are wealthy and who are climbing the wealth ladder, take control of vaste quantities of resources and dictate how they are used. For instance, owning and running a personal farm is not feasible for the majority of people. Another example is that of any small company where there's a megacorp that provides the same service/makes the same thing. It's really hard to get your foot in the door once there's massive control of that specific thing, where they'll always be able to undercut your price. People are forced to work for large companies whether they want to or not. Furthermore, the wealth that exists in pretty much any large corporation relies heavily on a huge amount of low-wage workers who have little to no prospect of advancement, where the jobs are often incredibly boring. With enough low-wage workers, they pretty much have to buy the cheap goods, and you've got a catch22.

You say that economic growth gives people more of a choice, but it also closes doors to some choices too.

[Vendetta21]

This point is what I want to talk about in regards to saying that having rich people causes poor people. It touches on a point I almost put in in my first post which I decided to remove, but I want to touch on it again. We are both agreed the quoted sentence above. So surely you must see that if that infrastructure weren't there, there'd be no problems of trying to fit into it.

This is an astute point, but which poverty are we talking about? Are we talking about poverty in America? Because poverty in America happens as a result of other factors, not the fact that infrastructure is imposed on people.

If we're talking about poverty in Africa your point has some weight, but what has greater weight is the fact that the flow of goods that give power to the few has been unimpeded. Guns have done more harm than infrastructure ever would. And it is other elements like these. If we could stop every gun from going into Africa and allow Africans to live as though there wasn't anything going on in the rest of the world, we just might, but that is not the case.

By definition poverty cannot exist without richness existing, because poverty is a comparison in resources.

Poverty is a metric which is not measured in relativity but based on the minimum cost of things necessary for healthy life. There may be inadequacies or errors in the metrics we use to determine the poverty line, but the point holds true the same, even if the line we have set is too high or too low.

You say that economic growth gives people more of a choice, but it also closes doors to some choices too.

What? Wait please illuminate. Growth is pervasive, but not so much so that people will invest in a place that isn't welcoming to the investment. It's not like we're like "Shit! A subsistence jungle tribe! That's poverty! Let's make them succumb to our lifestyle!" and then force them all to work in factories. When job prospects come into an area that is traditionally deemed impoverished people flock to get jobs there, and there is a huge demand for those jobs. There is a lot of subsistence farmers in the world, and traditionally all the investment that the West tries to give them is clean water and maybe some farming tools, but mostly we just try to build wells in farming communities so they aren't drinking hazardous water.

I mean when we're being altruistic we're being realistic about it as well. And when a business is searching for investment prospects they are searching for places where there is stability and a possible workforce that is enthusiastic about working hard.

Actually to be honest I'm curious if you have a romantic view of the past, and you see modern culture as anathema to the better nature of humanity. I get the hint of this in what you say but I'm not sure if it's just misinterpretation based on the way you've phrased things.

[devonin]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Dear Devonin,

I'm sorry that science has been doing what it can to improve our quality of life. Next time we'll just let people develop parasites, diseases and have to hunt or gather their food so the laws of nature will apply more.

Science has done a wonderful job improving our quality of life and should continue to do so as much as possible. The whole point of my statement to which you were responding was to point out that we redirect a great deal of the energy and commodities that contribute to improving quality of life to people who aren't actually contributing anything back into the system.

I don't know where you got the impression that my statement regarding the laws of nature still applying to us meant ignorant savagery or the cessation of scientific endeavour.

I just mean that I hope when I'm 85, in the hospital, dying that nobody will feel obliged to dump 60 or 70 grand a year worth of treatment, machinery and hospital space into keeping me going until I'm 95, in the hospital begging to be let go.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Although it is completely tangential: I prefer the double post. It signifies to the reader that there was a gap in time between the two thoughts.

[devonin]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

I know and understand why it makes a certain kind of sense to post again instead of editing a post, but it would still be better to edit, and then either preface your edit with "Edit:" or seperate the content with a line of *****'s or something, considering I'm pretty much going to be obliged to merge them all anyway.

[Cavernio]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Vendetta: Ever study the social effects of the industrial revolution? Suicide rates soared, at least in England. And yet job prospects of working in a factory within countries undergoing industrialization were what drew people to live in ****-holes of cities. My own romantic view of the past, perhaps, but I've learned facts to back this up. But again, I don't even need this. People like nature. People vacation in the wilderness, along beaches, and take pictures of sunsets because they like them and are drawn to them. Oh, there's also the suspiciousness of current staggering rates of depression in the developed world too. Don't get me wrong though, I'm no luddite. I wouldn't be sitting here, talking on the internet from my home computer if I were. I do imagine how nice it'd be to be able to own a small farm and actually make enough money to not live in poverty. That's the extent of it.

When I've written my posts, I've generally been thinking of poverty within North America, and I doubt that you can say that our lifestyle has been fully embraced by everyone. And what I was trying to say is that rich people DO force certain life choices on those who aren't rich enough to resist, and make other choices an impossibility. You laugh that no one forces jungle-faring tribes to work in factories only because the possibility to have such a lifestyle in North America is so far gone you failed to even think (probably) about it.

I understand that generally people will plop down jobs where they're wanted, but that in no way fixes or helps poverty when those are dead-end jobs.

[devonin]

Re: Solutions to World-Wide Poverty?

Ever study the social effects of the industrial revolution? Suicide rates soared, at least in England. And yet job prospects of working in a factory within countries undergoing industrialization were what drew people to live in ****-holes of cities.

If you haven't, you need to watch this right now: http://blip.tv/file/855937 or at least the first 2 or 3 minutes.